California Star: "A Rush to the Gold Washings" - 1848
Newspaper articles on the gold rush in California
06: Expansion and Sectionalism
1844: Letter of Mr. Walker, of Mississippi, relative to the annexation of Texas: in reply to the call of the people of Carroll County, Kentucky, to communicate his views on that subject : Walker, Robert J. (Robert John), 1801-1869 : Free Download, Borrow,
How many teachers tell students that there were southern Senators who suggested that the North should approve of the annexation of Texas because it would drain slaves away from the most northern slave states? In
Southern Abolitionist Angelina Grimké | The Abolitionists | PBS LearningMedia
3 to 5 minute videos summarizing the lives of prominent abolitionists
Activity 3: Anthony Burns—Slave-Catchers Come to Boston for the Last Time
The breathtaking courage of Harriet Tubman - Janell Hobson | TED-Ed
Will the real John Brown please stand up?
This lesson has students trying to develop their own understanding of John Brown from a cross section of primary source documents. Perhaps more than any other figure in US History, Brown is ripe for a lesson in which students have to build an understanding from widely divergent and contradictory messages - was he a saint or a sinner? Terrorist or freedom fighter?
How one piece of legislation divided a nation - Ben Labaree, Jr. - YouTube
6 minute animated movie explaining the Kansas-Nebraska Act, connecting it with the Missouri Compromise, and ignoring the Compromise of 1850
Lesson D: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: A Case Study of Resistance
Secession Era Editorials Project:
Editorials about John Brown from newspapers across the country
Harpers Ferry Raid | House Divided
Collection of short paragraphs and excerpts from current and past books about John Brown including textbooks. Great for a comparison of impressions of John Brown across time
John Browns Raid – Washington County CVB
Native Peoples of Oklahoma - Cherokee Nation v. Georgia Appeal Trial - 3.3.5 Contemporary Challenges - YouTube
There is no such things as "Cherokee". That quote alone should give teachers and students pause. GIve this video a few minutes and it will change the way you talk about Native Americans. This provides on explanation of how "UKB" and the "Cherokee Nation" today differentiate themselves today
The Contested Election of 1855 | Civil War on the Western Border: The Missouri-Kansas Conflict, 1854-1865
This includes broadsides from the first election in Kansas following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act - notice how there are claims of fraud before the election is even held.
Who claims hallowed ground? John Brown's Raid in Space, Time, and Public Memory | Society for US Intellectual History
A short essay that shows how the memory of John Brown has been contested by contrasting events in 1906 and 1957
Slavery Was Integral to Texas’s Transition From Republic to Statehood, but This Textbook Doesn’t Tell the Full Story – Texas Monthly
Delete those old Alamo slides from your slidedeck and have your students read this instead. Start the teaching of histories of the past with a brief reading of how histories of the past are argued over
Slavery, Madness, and the 1840 Census - The UncommonWealth
Teachers and students looking for connections between the past and present can look at Today's arguments concerning census questions and the length of time it is conducted can look to the 1804s, when it was claimed that free African Americans were ten times more likely to be considered "idiots" in the census
Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” Performed by Kerry Washington - YouTube
3 minute video of Truth's famous speech targeting the confluence of anti-slavery and woman's rights in the 1850s
Sojourner Truth: Ain't I A Woman? (U.S. National Park Service)
Test of the speech and statement concerning different transcriptions of it.
Why America Needs a Slavery Museum - YouTube
John Cummings bought property in Louisiana, then learned later learned of the history of his investment. He was inspired to use the plantation he bought to teach Americans of the history of slavery. This six minute video focuses on the Whitney Plantation museum outside of New Orleans
Pawnee Rock State Historic Site - Google Maps
Imagine looking out from this site and seeing a herd of at least a half-million buffalo. That is what Stephen Kearny and his scouts reported when they stopped here on his 1846 expedition of the Mexican War
House Divided Speech - Lincoln Home National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)
The United States Magazine and Democratic Review - Google Books
Almost every US History teacher tells students about Manifest Destiny, boiling down an explanation of the term to about eight words in a bullet point of a 18 slides presentation that students dutifully copy and recognize out of four other distractors in a multiple choice question. This is the article the phrase comes from - teachers should be forced to read it and explain why they think their teaching of the phrase does any justice to history at all
“An Irrepressible Conflict” - Teaching American History
Seward's "Irrepressible Conflict" speech is thought to have played a role in preventing him from getting the Republican nomination for president in 1860 because it was too radical. Students looking at the highlighted sections could see not a moral argument against slavery - but an economic argument. "Free" labor (white labor) was in competition with slavery.
1846: Representative Joshua Giddings of Ohio - speech against the Mexican War
Whig Joshua Reed Giddings, of Ohio, argues against various points in the President's message about the Mexican War. Giddings condemns the policy of territorial aggrandizement which he argues is the cause of the war. He questions the object of the war and argues that war was provoked by the United States.
White Antiracist Activists — Teaching While White
Look at the way in which this organization describes John Brown and how it uses language to shape the reader's understanding of what he did. This can be provided to students alongside other descriptions as a dbq - as a secondary source DBQ
Filmmaker Uncovers Her Family's Shocking Slave-Trading History, Urges Americans to Explore Own Roots - YouTube
Katrina Browne documented her roots in the film, "Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North" which revealed how her family, based in Rhode Island, was once the largest slave trading family in U.S. history. After the film aired on PBS in 2008, Browne went on to found the Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery. We speak to Browne and Craig Steven Wilder, author of the new book, "Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America's Universities."
Speech of Jefferson Davis before the Mississippi Legislature, Nov. 16, 1858,where he advocates secession if an abolitionist is elected president.
Students should see the glorification of death in the language of secessionists before the Civil War
The Enslaved Households of President James K. Polk - White House Historical Association
In the era of The 1776 Commission and fighting over what to teach - the White House Historical Association is making no bones about the history of slavery in the White House
Slave Communities & Resistance · SHEC: Resources for Teachers
This is the whole package - primary & secondary documents, teaching activities, etc.
Correspondence of John C. Calhoun - Volume 2
Students may be intrigued to know how historians read the mail of people of the past, looking through their personal correspondence and journals. Teachers might be shocked to know how much of John Calhoun's mail survives. And everyone should be shocked at how easy it is to search - and this is just one of several volumes. Search "Texas", Search "negro" - and see how much you can find. History education publishers should realize how much they leave out of their primary source documents